Articles

This is a walk through the first fifty flags in our database, taken in the order they come. It is an arbitrary way to travel, which is exactly why it ...

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan sit on what was once the heartland of the Silk Road, and their flags car...

Afghanistan and Argentina have almost nothing in common except this: both countries have spent long stretches in political turmoil, and both have a fl...

Run your eye down the flags of the Americas and a few habits show up again and again: skies, seas, stars, and coats of arms carried over from the mome...

Flags from smaller countries and territories rarely make it into the general conversation, which is a shame, because a few of them are doing more inte...

Flags have never been only markers of nations, but in this century they have taken on a second job as banners for socio-political movements. Changing ...

Argentina and Bolivia sit at opposite ends of the Andes, and their flags took different routes to saying who they are. One looks up at the sky. The ot...

Afghanistan and Algeria sit thousands of miles apart and share no obvious history, but their flags were assembled from similar raw material: a colonia...

Nobody picks a flag's colors at random. Red dominates in Algeria and Afghanistan; the Bahamas and Belize lean on blue. Those choices carry emotional w...

When a government falls, the flag usually goes with it. That is the simplest rule in vexillology and it holds across wildly different circumstances: r...

Reading flags in the south Vexillology is the study of flags, and the interesting part is not the color scheme but what the color scheme is doing. The...

Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia sit next to each other on the map and share a good deal of history, but their flags argue for three different things: a w...

Where the Afghan flag comes from The flag's story starts in the 19th century, and it has been redrawn repeatedly since, usually in step with a change ...

A flag is a very small canvas. A country gets a few colors and a shape or two to say something about who it is, which means the color choices tend to ...

Flags get designed under specific circumstances, and a surprising number of them were designed during or immediately after a war. Afghanistan and Alge...

A surprising number of national flags carry a creature that never existed. Dragons, double-headed eagles, gods borrowed from older religions: these ar...

Countries change their flags less often than you might expect, and when they do it is rarely about aesthetics. A redesign is usually the visible end o...

Most surveys of national flags stop at the countries that currently exist. That leaves out a good number of banners once flown over real territory by ...

What a flag is actually saying Vexillology, the study of flags, is really the study of how a country wants to be seen. A flag has to hold a collective...

A state that most of the world declines to recognize still needs a flag, and arguably needs one more than a recognized state does. Where there is no s...

Post-colonial flags had a difficult brief. They had to represent a country that in most cases had only just become one, using a visual language that w...

Most Caribbean flags began as adaptations of imperial insignia. As independence arrived through the region, countries replaced them with designs of th...

A flag designed at independence has a harder job than most. It has to identify a country that did not exist in its current form the year before, and i...

Argentina and Brazil share a border and almost nothing else in how they chose to represent themselves. One flag was born out of a revolution, the othe...